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Looks really nice. Here's my feedback to another app maker that would make any product in this category into a killer tool: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item

by dchuk 4y ago

Looks really nice. Here's my feedback to another app maker that would make any product in this category into a killer tool: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32313583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32313583 " 9 points by dchuk 3 months ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Show HN: Emery – Personal productivity workspace I’ve tried a lot of apps like this over the years. Two main things I’ve struggled with with all of them: 1) none seem to handle multiple calendars well. I have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and a side project calendar, I want them all to be independent, have tasks blocked out on them, etc, but still be aware of each other. So for example, I want to schedule a doctor’s appointment on my personal and have my other calendars mirror that time block, but scrub the details/make it generic. Super specific idea obviously, but if I don’t have it I have so much manual overhead aligning everything that I just give up and do it by hand. 2) they are all dogshit slow (not sure about this one, haven’t tried it). The combo of electron apps and what I guess is just calendar synchronization latency makes them have surprise ux patterns and overall just shitty experience in general. A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail. Last: my notes live separately (as most people’s do I’ve seen anecdotally). I hope someone can really succeed in this space because time blocking is so powerful, but nothing has fit my lifestyle quite right yet unfortunately."

jreinstra 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback, this is super helpful to us! We are working to improve our multiple calendar support soon and always keep performance top of mind.
- dchuk 4y ago
  Happy to help. If you want an advisor of some sort who is a career product leader, does sales now, has an insane schedule, and is also a father of a young kid so has a crazy personal life, I’m your guy. My Twitter handle is in my profile here.
- neill 4y ago
  Some further feedback, not specific to your tool but because I've seen a few of these recently and would love to find a tool that meets my needs, it's maybe worth saying now- When I see responses like this, instinctively my internal reaction is: "Okay, so they don't have this and say they're working on improvements, but I don't know how effectively they build new features or when this might be released. Will it be a week? A month? 6 months?" I don't know the best solution, but having some more information to answer this would keep me more engaged with products that are being actively developed. I don't want to get bought in to something that iterates at a snails pace, but I could commit myself to trying tools that rapidly iterate and improve..
  - jreinstra 4y ago
    There's definitely something there - we've thought about this on the team too. Maybe publicly committing to ship features by certain dates?
    - dchuk 4y ago
      nah that's going to bring a lot of pain to your world. Go read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction-Uncertainty/dp/149197172X/ https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction... It's hands down the best approach to roadmapping out there. The tl;dr: Commit to Outcomes (future states of the world your product can create that don't exist today, and have meaning for your customers) without committing to solving for those Outcomes in any particular way. So something like "It's easy for customers to get their data out of the product to feed into other applications" is an Outcome, and the Outputs can be all sorts of things: APIs, Direct Integrations to Other Apps, Excel exports, or just a dumb form for them to request the data and you have a SQL script you run to do it because it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment.
AequitasOmnibus 4y ago
> I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail. Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described. I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.
- jreinstra 4y ago
  Yeah, I actually pay for Trello premium too because of recurring tasks! I use General Task at work but still Trello for personal stuff. We are actively working on recurring tasks now and are definitely interested in exploring a kanban-style view in the future as well.
Moissanite 4y ago
> A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail. I feel exactly the same, and haven't been able to figure out how to make it work using any combination of Notion, Todoist or Trello. Todoist with project sub-groups of "backlog", "in-progress", "blocked" and "recurring" is about the best I've managed, but I think I've just gotten too habituated to giving every task a date and managing things from the "upcoming/this week" view. Making better use of sub-tasks might help, but then you end up needing to have a kanban board within a task for managing the sub-tasks...
- dmje 4y ago
  Try TickTick? I've run with pretty much all the to-do apps over the years but TT has nailed it for me. Calendar integration, kanban view, tags, lists, markdown, etc etc
rish1_2 4y ago
You can give v1 of Atomic - AI scheduler (https://atomiclife.app https://atomiclife.app), a try for handling multiple calendars (still in Beta). Working on v2 for client or team meetings and autopilot. It will be targeted for solo developers/ indie hackers / small teams
- rish1_2 4y ago
  If you want to follow my work on the project (I #buildinpublic) - go here: https://twitter.com/rish1_2 https://twitter.com/rish1_2

by dchuk 4y ago

jreinstra 4y ago

Thanks for the feedback, this is super helpful to us! We are working to improve our multiple calendar support soon and always keep performance top of mind.

dchuk 4y ago
Happy to help. If you want an advisor of some sort who is a career product leader, does sales now, has an insane schedule, and is also a father of a young kid so has a crazy personal life, I’m your guy. My Twitter handle is in my profile here.
neill 4y ago
Some further feedback, not specific to your tool but because I've seen a few of these recently and would love to find a tool that meets my needs, it's maybe worth saying now- When I see responses like this, instinctively my internal reaction is: "Okay, so they don't have this and say they're working on improvements, but I don't know how effectively they build new features or when this might be released. Will it be a week? A month? 6 months?" I don't know the best solution, but having some more information to answer this would keep me more engaged with products that are being actively developed. I don't want to get bought in to something that iterates at a snails pace, but I could commit myself to trying tools that rapidly iterate and improve..
- jreinstra 4y ago
  There's definitely something there - we've thought about this on the team too. Maybe publicly committing to ship features by certain dates?
  - dchuk 4y ago
    nah that's going to bring a lot of pain to your world. Go read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction-Uncertainty/dp/149197172X/ https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction... It's hands down the best approach to roadmapping out there. The tl;dr: Commit to Outcomes (future states of the world your product can create that don't exist today, and have meaning for your customers) without committing to solving for those Outcomes in any particular way. So something like "It's easy for customers to get their data out of the product to feed into other applications" is an Outcome, and the Outputs can be all sorts of things: APIs, Direct Integrations to Other Apps, Excel exports, or just a dumb form for them to request the data and you have a SQL script you run to do it because it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment.

AequitasOmnibus 4y ago

> I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail. Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described. I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.

jreinstra 4y ago
Yeah, I actually pay for Trello premium too because of recurring tasks! I use General Task at work but still Trello for personal stuff. We are actively working on recurring tasks now and are definitely interested in exploring a kanban-style view in the future as well.

Moissanite 4y ago

> A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail. I feel exactly the same, and haven't been able to figure out how to make it work using any combination of Notion, Todoist or Trello. Todoist with project sub-groups of "backlog", "in-progress", "blocked" and "recurring" is about the best I've managed, but I think I've just gotten too habituated to giving every task a date and managing things from the "upcoming/this week" view. Making better use of sub-tasks might help, but then you end up needing to have a kanban board within a task for managing the sub-tasks...

dmje 4y ago
Try TickTick? I've run with pretty much all the to-do apps over the years but TT has nailed it for me. Calendar integration, kanban view, tags, lists, markdown, etc etc

rish1_2 4y ago

You can give v1 of Atomic - AI scheduler (https://atomiclife.app https://atomiclife.app), a try for handling multiple calendars (still in Beta). Working on v2 for client or team meetings and autopilot. It will be targeted for solo developers/ indie hackers / small teams

rish1_2 4y ago
If you want to follow my work on the project (I #buildinpublic) - go here: https://twitter.com/rish1_2 https://twitter.com/rish1_2